


the worst funeral ever.

by TittyAlways



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, M/M, Unresolved Romantic Tension, just cause you dont talk about it doesnt mean you dont know about it, not really unresolved, unqualified medical attention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 05:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11845320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TittyAlways/pseuds/TittyAlways
Summary: “Doesn’t take much to have a hit put out on you, these days,” Tyki commented, blithe and unconcerned, and turned to face Allen. One hand lax on the countertop, the other holding his glass, and neither anywhere near his belt. It was as good a show of peace as if he’d raised them above his head.





	the worst funeral ever.

**Author's Note:**

> i watched john wick last night and i wasnt gonna do it but then i went and did it and uhhhh. yep. here we are now.

Allen dropped his bag heavily on the floor and Tyki didn’t bother pretending he’d only just realised he’d arrived. Continued as he had been - back to the door, his hands luxuriating in the task of pouring himself a drink. He’d cracked the cap of Allen’s good whiskey. The fifty year old stuff that’d been on his shelf since he’d packed his shit and left Cross behind. 

“Doesn’t take much to have a hit put out on you, these days,” Tyki commented, blithe and unconcerned, and turned to face Allen. One hand lax on the countertop, the other holding his glass, and neither anywhere near his belt. It was as good a show of peace as if he’d raised them above his head. 

Allen arched a brow, and almost regretted it when the action served to remind him of the nasty gash he’d caught alongside the butt of a gun to his head. “Guess I don’t have to ask why you’re here then,” he said and took even steps up to the counter, left the bag by the door. He had a handgun beneath his jacket and a penknife in his sock, but he wasn’t stupid enough as to believe Tyki Mikk was standing in his kitchen unarmed. 

He wasn’t stupid enough to pull a gun when he was being offered a moment’s peace. 

Tyki’s grin was the disastrous kind of beautiful that Allen couldn’t help but love. Sharp and sly and dangerous. Confident. Calm. Only his eyes showed the fire licking under his skin. “I’m not here to kill you, boy.”

Allen snorted a dry laugh and reached up to open a cupboard and pull down a glass, took the bottle Tyki offered him and reasoned simply, “Guess that explains why I’m not dead,” while he poured his own drink. 

Tyki hummed ambivalently, unhappily, and he reached out to pinch the hem of Allen’s shirt, skewed it while he drank to try for a better look at the bloodstains printed across the white. “Doesn’t look like you’re doing yourself any favours with that.”

“How much?” Allen asked, refusing to let Tyki’s carelessness put him on edge. 

Tyki dropped his hand from Allen’s shirt. “One million,” he said, and Allen might have believed him if it weren’t such an absurd number.

“One million,” he repeated, scoffed, shook his head at the glass in his hand and threw back the rest of the drink in one short mouthful. “You’re so full of shit.”

Tyki watched his face, the smile still sitting on his lips almost like an afterthought. Allen kept his eyes on his hands for a long moment, watched his fingers tremor. The silence was thick, punctuated by the absent drip of the faucet into the sink. 

“Three,” Tyki corrected. Allen’s hands clenched on the benchtop for a moment before he pushed himself up to stand straight. 

“See,” he sighed, rolling his stiff shoulders back to shrug his bloodstained jacket off, “now I can’t believe that you  _ aren’t  _ here to collect.” He pulled the gun out from the waistband of his pants and tossed it onto the benchtop, didn’t match Tyki’s eyes when he brought his hands up to work at the button of his collar. 

Tyki didn’t say a word. Not when Allen gingerly pulled the shirt from his shoulders, baring his abused and bleeding body, and not when he made a short, brusque gesture to the cupboard above the stove hood. Just wordlessly pulled down the medicine box and quickly familiarised himself with the bottles of prescription painkillers while Allen hefted himself to sit up on the bench and poured another drink. 

“Here,” he said at length, tapping two pills into his palm from a clear orange bottle, and held them out for Allen to take. 

He plucked them from Tyki’s palm, kept his eyes down and didn’t let his fingers linger on Tyki’s hand. Threw the painkillers back with a mouthful of whiskey and let his head fall back against the cabinets. Caught whatever it was Tyki tossed at his chest. 

“Clean yourself up,” he commanded, and Allen forced himself to watch Tyki for a few seconds. There was something gruff about the way he spoke, dissatisfaction simmering in the way his hands dug through the medical supplies. 

Allen breathed out a sigh, weary and worn down and just. So fucking tired. Let his shoulders slump, let all that fight fall out of him. Looked down at the packet he was cradling against his bare bruised bleeding chest and found alcohol wipes. Closing his eyes for a deep breath, Allen pushed himself up and tugged open the packet, pulled out a cloth and brought it up to his eye. 

Wiped away the blood and grit, hand slow and heavy, and when he pulled the wipe away to look at it he figured he really must look like absolute shit if Tyki goddamn Mikk was putting aside three million dollars to help stitch him up. He brought the cloth back up to his eyebrow, prodded carefully at the cut before sighing and dropping the soiled wipe into the sink beside him, tugged another free and began working down his body. 

Bullet grazed his shoulder, knife caught on his rib and skewed a jagged line across his chest. That one probably bled the most. What had him worried was the deep messy gash just there above the waist of his pants. Fucking broken bottle. Like there weren’t enough guns and knives and fists flying about, but someone had to go and glass him. 

The injury was still oozing dark blood, but Allen figured that if he’d made it an hour or two without dying, he probably wasn’t bleeding from anything important.

“Check this one for glass,” he instructed, pointing at it.

Tyki’s eyes fell on the deep cut, flickered to his face, and then away. “Lay over the stove,” was all he said, and Allen reached up behind his head to flick on the rangehood light. 

“Mikk,” he said, hands curled around the edge of the benchtop. When Tyki met his eyes, his expression was so perfectly clear of emotion that Allen had to duck his head, huff a sound like a bitter laugh. “You have that look on your face like you’re trying not to think about how mad you are.”

Tyki blinked at him, slow and considering. 

“I haven’t decided,” he said at length, answering that long, tense question that had been sitting in the air over them since Allen’s arrival. His eyes slipped away from Allen’s. 

Allen sighed, long and deep, and swung his legs up over the stove. “Somehow that makes me feel better about having you perform a home operation on me.”

Tyki snorted an unwilling laugh and pushed him to lay back on the counter with a hand on his shoulder. _ “How _ does that make you feel better?” he asked, plainly amused, and leaned in over Allen’s stomach with a set of forceps in his hand, carefully examining the messy cuts from the glass.

“You’re a bit of a psychopath,” Allen commented, his smirk smug and teasing when Tyki turned his head to arch a scathing brow at him.

“Your life is literally in my hands right now,” Tyki commented, rapped his knuckles lightly against a bruised rib, “so you might want to watch what you say.”

Allen laughed and clutched at that spot, pressed his fingers tenderly around the set of bruises Tyki had agitated. “I mean that,” he gasped, struggling not to laugh, “in the best way possible.” The look Tyki gave him told him he wasn’t having any of it. “Meticulous,” he tried instead, and Tyki shook his head on the breath of a laugh, kept his eyes on his hands while he dug a shard of glass out of one of the wounds. “I mean,” Allen struggled not to laugh, tried to keep himself still under Tyki’s careful hands, “if you fix me up and then decide you want the money, that’s fine. Three mill is a lot.”

“I’ll keep that in mind while I weigh it all up,” Tyki commented, dry, and dropped a second narrow shard onto the bench. 

“You’re so particular about being the one to make the kill,” Allen continued, eyes on the dirty undersides of his cupboards, “that there’s no way you’d let me die from getting glassed.”

Tyki was silent for another long stretch of minutes, painstakingly examining each cut from the injury for any remaining slivers. He dug out one or two more, and it was only when he dropped the forceps onto the bench that he straightened from his hunched position and pinned Allen with a heavy look. “There’s no way I’d let you die from getting glassed,” he said, with none of that bullshit attached. 

Allen lifted his head a little so he could bring his drink to his lips. Slumped back after he’d swallowed it down and held the glass resting atop his chest. Huffed a sigh and looked at all those oil stains under his cupboards. 

“I was saving this,” he said and lifted the glass, swirled it around a little and lifted his head to throw back the rest of it. 

“What for?” Tyki asked, and poured a fresh drink into his glass from the bottle. 

Allen shrugged. 

“That’s what people do, isn’t it?” he reasoned without any real conviction. “Save alcohol?”

“Yeah,” Tyki allowed skeptically while he threaded the suture needle, “for occasions, though. Birthday, graduation, wedding.” He lifted a shoulder in distracted ambivalence. “Funeral, I guess.”

Allen huffed at the oil stains and reasoned, “Guess I was saving it for you to break into my house sometime and help yourself.”

Tyki snorted a laugh and tugged a couple of alcohol wipes out of the packet, cleaned up the deep gash as well as he could and settled in to start stitching Allen back together. “If that’s the case,” he murmured as he worked, “I’d like to think I’m being quite considerate, sharing it with you.”

“Oh?” Allen prodded, smile wavering under the disconcerting sensation of being sutured under anaesthesia.

“Absolutely,” Tyki confirmed, eyes on his hands, working quick and efficient. “I could have just killed you and taken the bottle, but here I am - stitching you up and sharing my whiskey.”

_ “Yours,”  _ Allen repeated, and couldn’t help his laughter. 

Tyki’s hands stopped until he did, but he didn’t make any move to shush Allen or tell him to still. Kept a small smile hidden in the corners of his lips while he waited, wiping up the extra bleeding Allen’s laughter caused. 

“Saving wine for a funeral is a bit morbid,” he said at length, still grinning, and Tyki went back to work. 

“I don’t think a funeral is usually the intended celebration,” Tyki reasoned. “Maybe they didn’t make it to the other milestones first.”

“I’ve never wanted to get married,” Allen said, looking at the glass and ignoring the uncomfortable tugging of Tyki’s stitches below his navel, “I didn’t graduate, and. Honestly I’m not entirely sure how old I am.”

“Twenty-two, didn’t you say?” Tyki hummed, leaning in close to Allen’s wound.

“More or less,” he shrugged, “but I guess I missed my twenty-first in any case.”

“Mm,” he said while he worked, eyes on his hands. “Guess that makes this your funeral then.”

“I don’t think the cleanup crew are big on ceremonies,” Allen agreed with a wry smile.

“Would you like me to say a few words?” Tyki offered, lips twisting in a grin while he kept his eyes on his steady hands. 

“By all means,” Allen allowed with a matching smirk, gesturing with his glass for Tyki to go on.

He shook his head on a laugh and huffed,  _ “Well.  _ Where to begin.” He kept his silence for another few minutes, fingers pushing the needle through Allen’s skin, but the look on his face said he was thinking about it rather than avoiding it. 

At length, eyes unwavering on Allen’s injury, Tyki said, “I think… if you had a life like Allen Walker’s, it might be easy to believe there could only be one path for him to take.”

“God,” Allen groaned, bringing an arm up to cover his eyes, “I’m not here for an eval on all the life choices I failed to make.”

“Shut up,” Tyki commanded shortly. “Dead people don’t talk.” Allen snorted and lifted his hands in supplication. It took another few moments for Tyki to gather his thoughts and continue his eulogy.

“He was proud of his inherent dishonesty, probably less charming than he seemed to think, and for a hit man he was awfully good at leaving targets alive and collecting the bounty regardless.”

Allen heaved a weighty sigh and lifted his head to mutter into his glass, “This is the worst funeral I’ve ever been to,” before taking a drink.

“Tough,” was all Tyki had to say to that, and Allen craned his neck to see what headway he was making with those stitches. “You might think taking the target to the people who issued out a bounty so they could kill them themselves is hubris, but the truth is Walker was terrified to be faced with the consequence of his own actions.”

“Now you’re just being hurtful,” Allen muttered, and propped himself up on his elbow to watch Tyki suture the last couple of stitches. 

“As much as he might have liked to convince you otherwise,” Tyki continued, ignoring him, his voice quiet and focused while he tied off the twine and reached for the scissors, “he was not made to walk the path he followed.” He took a step back from the bench, and looked at Allen.

His eyes weren’t what Allen would call  _ challenging,  _ so much as… daring to tell him he was wrong.

Allen pushed himself to sit up on the counter and swung his legs down from the stove, kept his eyes down while he reached for a gauze and medical tape. He pressed the soft white fabric close against the messy cluster of neat stitches in his abdomen and taped it in place with distracted dexterity. “You seem to know me better than I know myself,” he said, blase in his condescension, eyes kept down on his hands. 

“You hide yourself so deep down in layers of masks, I’m not surprised you might think one of them is real.” 

Allen heard the flick of a lighter, the quiet drag of Tyki’s first pull from the cigarette, smelled the burning tobacco a moment later.

Allen pressed the tape onto his skin, winced at the disturbing bruise-like feeling of jostling the anaesthetised gash, and placed his hands at the edge of the counter. Curled his fingers around the lip. Glanced up at Tyki’s impassive face, unmoving stance. 

“I don’t like killing,” he said, and forced his shoulders into a stiff shrug. “I don’t think that comes as a shock to anyone in this room, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

Tyki lifted the cigarette from his lips and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling, took his time clearing his lungs before he admitted, “There are surprisingly few people in this trade who enjoy the work they do.”

Allen scoffed a laugh and glanced away, lifted his drink to his lips and muttered against the rim of the glass, “So why do we do it?”

“Because the payout is incredible,” Tyki reasoned simply, without hesitation, and brought the cigarette back to his lips. “And it’s easier than it should be,” he added, voice thick with smoke.

“To take a human life?” Allen asked, and shook his head with a small smile, sipped his drink. “I don’t think it’s easy at all.”

“Sure you do,” Tyki countered without much dramatic flare, stepped in close to Allen and reached around him for the handgun on the counter behind him. “Just because you rarely pulled the trigger yourself, doesn’t mean you weren’t directly responsible for your hits.”

“I’m just the middleman,” Allen reasoned, eyes flicking down and away. His mouth twisted in a bitter, wry smile. “Delivery boy.”

Tyki watched him for a short moment, too close, too clever. He stepped back, Allen’s gun in his hand, and checked the clip. “You could have just killed them and collected the money,” he said, eyes on his hands, taking his time. “You’d get the full payout and they’d get a merciful death.”

Allen’s eyes narrowed, his brow pinched in the slightest of frowns. He watched Tyki’s face, the studious focus in his eyes when he reloaded the clip and filled the chamber. 

“Instead you get half the money you’re promised for a job you only made harder for yourself. Surely,” he glanced up, catching Allen’s gaze, “you’re not so naive as to think they weren’t killed slowly… and painfully.”

Allen’s lips twisted down and he glanced away, looked down at the knobs on the stove. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

He didn’t flinch at the cold barrel of the gun pressed against his head, the hard metal aligned with his temple. He’d just watched Tyki load it, he knew there was a bullet in there just waiting to be fired. His heart beat no heavier, his fingers trembled no more than they already had been. 

“If you really believed that,” Tyki murmured, “why are you so accepting of death?”

Allen reached up and wrapped his hand around the barrel of the gun, pushed it aside. Tyki held against him for a moment, but relinquished it to Allen without anything like a fight. A statement, really. That he could keep it there if he wanted to. 

He didn’t want to.

“If you’re going to do something,” Allen muttered and emptied the chamber, removed the clip and slid it away across the bench, “just fucking commit to it.”

Tyki scoffed, derisive, and picked up his drink from beside Allen’s thigh. “That’s rich,” he muttered, and Allen shot him a heavy, scathing look. Tyki held his glare a moment before turning his head away and throwing back what was left in his glass. “Think you’re worth three million dollars, boy?”

“That’s something you have to decide yourself,” Allen replied simply, and picked up the bottle from the bench to pour another drink into Tyki’s glass. 

Tyki hummed dissatisfaction and came in to lean his elbows on the counter, brought his drink to his lips and muttered, “Yeah, you  _ would  _ say that.”

Allen turned a confused frown down to him, demanded, “What’s  _ that  _ supposed to mean?”

“No offence,” Tyki said drily and paused to sip his drink before meeting Allen’s eyes with an unimpressed look, “but if you were asked to put a financial value on your own life, you’d probably throw it out on the side of the road with all the hard junk, free for anyone who walks by.”

Allen pinned his eyes to the apartment door and let a weary sigh slip past his lips. 

“Three million’s a  _ lot,”  _ Tyki said, unconcerned by Allen’s lackluster engagement. “At the start of the day I was thinking - you know, five and I’d do it no questions asked.” Allen arched his brows in quiet appreciation, but didn’t respond further than that. “Then I started thinking how fucked that is,” Tyki continued, and Allen tilted his head, pursed his lips in considerate agreement. “It’s fucked,” Tyki repeated, “that I could put a dollar amount on your life, whereby I would have no qualms with ending it.”

Allen looked down at his drink, swirled it a little. “I’d say that’s pretty fucked,” he allowed, “yeah.”

Tyki huffed a sigh and shook his head, turned around to lean back against the counter. Arms folded across his chest - drink held against the crook of his shoulder, cigarette burning down to ash while he reigned in his agitation by crossing his ankles. “It’s fucked,” he said, “and I don’t really feel that guilty about it.”

“Five million is a lot of money,” Allen agreed, nodding vaguely. 

“I thought I’d do it for three million,” Tyki said, “and, you know. There’s nothing  _ stopping  _ me.”

“You could always do with an extra spot of cash.”

“But I think I’d miss you.”

Allen blinked at the apartment door a couple of times, glanced surreptitiously aside at Tyki. He was looking straight ahead, lips pursed while he worked those figures through his head. A lump sum for something intangible. Irreplaceable. 

Invaluable. 

Allen looked down at his drink, and had the thought that the whiskey really hadn’t been much worth waiting for. “You’re so full of shit,” he muttered.

Tyki glanced at Allen from the corner of his eye, smirk curling at the corner of his mouth.

“Just seeing if you were listening,” he said, and pushed up from the counter. Finished his drink in two long mouthfuls and brought the burned-down cigarette to his lips. “Thanks for the drink, boy,” he murmured, and dropped the butt of the cig into Allen’s glass. “I’ll see you around.”

Allen didn’t move even when the door closed behind him. Sat holding his soiled drink, hand lax between his legs. Posture slumped forwards. 

He breathed a sigh, and blinked slowly. Glanced down to the sink beside him and upended his drink in it. “Your blind faith appalls me,” he muttered to the empty apartment, a smile playing at his lips. 

Picked up the bottle and looked at the dusty label. It was never too late for a twenty-first birthday, really. 


End file.
